I wrote Little Night as an elegy to all sisters who are, or who have been estranged, who have deep childhood memories and love for each other, but whom life has torn apart.  That’s how it feels to lose a sister to estrangement–as if  a limb has been ripped from your body, as if you’re no longer the full person you once were.  How can you be, who are you anymore, without your sister?

This week I watched the victim impact statements, given by Steven and Samantha Alexander, in the Jodi Arias trial in Maricopa County, AZ.  I cried along with each as they addressed the jury because I could feel the pain in their words, the heartbreak and devastation over losing their sibling–their brother Travis.  They spoke of how their family will never be the same with him gone.

Gone forever: unfathomable to think, to know, you’ll never see your sibling again.

In Little Night Clare took action that Anne cannot forgive and Anne cuts her out.  It’s not death, but the estrangement is total–no contact for years.  Years in sister terms are a lifetime.  In real life we sometimes speak out, shout out, fail to bite our tongues, speak from the heart, speak from the gut, speak without thinking, speak after endless thinking–our intentions might be good, but they scrape our sister raw.  She’s not ready to hear.  Or she’ll never be ready to hear.  You’ve gotten your facts wrong. You’ve attacked the man she loves.  You’ve attacked her life and she’ll never forgive you.  She’s out of there, and if you try to call she’ll hang up and if you email she’ll block your address.

These are ideas I explored in Little Night.  What to say, how to act, is great action required when you think your sibling is in danger?  The novel opens with Clare in prison.  She has struck out with violence because, believing Anne’s life was in danger, she attacked her sister’s abuser.  How do the sister’s relationships go on from there?  My mind is full of siblings who have lost each other.  I followed a murder trial years ago.  Ellen Sherman was murdered by her husband Ed, leaving behind a daughter, mother, sister, and friends.  I keep thinking of her sister.

Domestic violence played a role in Ellen’s death, as it does in Little Night.  I know a lot about domestic violence, more than I wish I did.  I’ve written about my experience in It Couldn’t Happen to Me.

My thoughts go to my own family.  In our case the missing sister is still alive.  It’s her choice to stay away.  There is a special anguish knowing the sister you love so much is out there, but you can’t reach her.  In fact, you might have been the one to drive her away.

For now I look at the paperback cover, at those two lovely sisters, and I imagine they are taking care of each other, hurrying toward something wonderful.  And they are going there together.  It gives me peace, eases my heart.

She loved the beach, and I’m sure that’s one reason I’m happiest with bare feet, walking along the tide line.  We would spend summer days building sandcastles, finding shells and sea glass, swimming to the raft, crabbing at the end of the beach.  Often she would sketch while my sisters and I played and swam; frequently we’d all be reading, covered with sunscreen, lost in our books.

When I grew up and moved to New York City, I’d take Amtrak to Old Saybrook CT nearly every weekend.  My mother would meet the train, no matter what time it was; Sundays came too soon, and I’d never want to leave.  The photo above (taken in 1988 or so) shows us at the train station, waiting for the train back to NY.  I read her expression and know she wasn’t ready for me to leave.  The picture brings back that moment and many emotions.

She died way too young, after a long illness.  After her death I was filled with memories of nurses and hospitals and the great sadness of losing her slowly.  But time has passed, and you know what?  I rarely think of her illness anymore.  The gift of time has been that I remember my mother being young and healthy, painting nearly every day, writing every night.  I remember watching Julia Child on Saturday afternoons, then cooking dinner together–sitting around the table at Hubbard’s Point, enjoying the meal with my sister and her family, laughing and talking and feeling that it would last forever, that our family would go on forever.

I wrote about her in an essay called “Midnight Typing.”  It appears in the collection What My Mother Gave Me, edited by Elizabeth Benedict.  Please comment below for the chance to win a copy of the book as well as a canvas tote bag printed with the cover of The Lemon Orchard.  I’d love to know about your mother, hear your stories and memories.

[UPDATE 5/12: Congratulations to Leela FitzGerald, our Mother's Day winner!]

Do you live in the same home town where you grew up?  Have you moved half a world away?  Do you love to visit the places you spent your childhood summers or have you explored new territories?

I’ve done both.  I love the Old Lyme beach cottage my grandparents built, and I’ve also left the familiar behind to search out new places.  It’s not that one is better than the other; it’s more a matter of listening to that inner voice and following where it leads.  Home is where the cats are, a place to sit quietly to think and write and read, a comfy chair in the shade.

What is the place that you call home?

[UPDATE May 7: Congratulations Rachel Hartwig on winning this week's drawing!]

Amazon • Apple • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

In The Lemon Orchard, Julia drives cross-country with Bonnie Blue–the family dog, a thirteen-year old Blue Merle Collie that had belonged to her daughter Jenny. They left Old Lyme CT and drove all the way to Malibu CA–from the Atlantic to the Pacific–to housesit Julia’s uncle’s villa in a lemon orchard in the Santa Monica Mountains.
I loved imagining that road trip because I know what good companionship and comfort animal friends can be. Bonnie, the collie in the novel, was inspired by a real-life Blue Merle collie that I knew when I was young. She lived with the family across the street; I babysat for the children and hung out at their house almost every day.
Bonnie was a sweet, beautiful dog. Her coat was lovely–long and flowing, marked with shades of gray and blue. She ran through the fields with us, tromped through deep snow when we’d hike to to skating pond and sledding hill, slept at my feet after the kids went to sleep, rested her chin on her paws and gazed up with such soulful eyes, I could almost read the love she had for that family.
So, two Bonnies–one that lives in my heart and memory, another that lives on the pages of The Lemon Orchard–soothing Julia, connecting her with her daughter Jenny. Or maybe they are one and the same…
Please comment below to be entered in our weekly drawing. Good luck!

[April 30: Congratulations to Alicia Mylott for winning this week's drawing!]

Boston belongs to school kids everywhere. When we were young, at R. J. Vance Elementary in New Britain, Connecticut, we could count on two annual field trips: one to the Boston Freedom Trail, the other to the Boston Museum of Science. At the museum we saw chicks hatching in incubators, fuzzy new life, and Foucault’s Pendulum, proving that the earth is not stationary but in constant rotation. The Freedom Trail took us from Boston Common past historic sites including—this sticks in my mind—the Granary Burying Ground with Mother Goose’s grave.
Although I’ve never lived in Boston, yesterday’s bombing felt personal. I think it did to everyone. The Boston Marathon is one of the world’s great sporting events. I can picture the finish line and feel the emotions of joy, exhilaration, exhaustion—people cheering their loved ones on, eight-year old Martin Richard of Dorchester waiting, watching for his dad to run past.
The cruelest bomb, if there is such a thing, placed in a location of celebration and victory, is designed for maximum injury, destruction, and trauma. News cameras showed slashed bodies and pools of blood. Graphic, visceral images I can’t get out of my mind.
And that place: that familiar stretch of Boylston Street, so near the Boston Public Library, where I spent hours researching and writing a never-published first book that I walked across the Common to hand-deliver to a publisher on Park Street. 951 Boylston Street once housed the Institute of Contemporary Art, where one literary evening I saw Tobias Wolff introduce Mary Robison, and she stood at the podium reading new work and drinking a beer, and the moment is emblazoned in my memory–a great and raucous gathering to celebrate a new collection of short stories.
My parents spent their wedding night at the Copley Plaza Hotel—many parents did, many friends did. My niece won a poetry prize at Regis College, and we held a celebratory dinner at a restaurant on Boylston Street. Our family sat around a big table with friends and young poets, and afterwards, in cold spring snow, we walked outside, right past the spot where yesterday the bombs went off.
There are moments in life you’ll always remember: where were you when you heard? Equally there are places in life that will gain new meaning after a tragedy—we were right there, we walked down that very street. This is human, a drawing together, touching the spot where others suffered, connecting through our hearts.
Right now I’m in California. The sky is bright blue. The breeze blows off the Pacific, not the Atlantic. But my heart is in New England. I can see the spring trees just starting to bud, can imagine sunlight reflecting on the McKim Building of the Boston Public Library. I can picture the yellow and red sandstone campanile of New Old South Church—shown so prominently in the news photos—towering over Boylston Street. A good friend works at Massachusetts General Hospital, helping trauma victims, and I know that and other hospitals are flooded with those needing help.
I’m far away, but I’m also right there, my heart and thoughts. So many of us are. Love to you, Boston.

Welcome friends!!
Please comment on this thread the chance to win an ARC of The Lemon Orchard as well as a special tote bag. We will notify the winner on Monday April 22.
Good luck!
Love,
Luanne

[UPDATE 4/22: Congratulations to Belinda Daniels Guy our latest giveaway winner! We hope she enjoys her advance copy THE LEMON ORCHARD as well as a tote bag featuring the novel's cover.]

I’m so grateful to the lovely and talented Caroline Leavitt for featuring The Lemon Orchard (and me) on her blog.
The Lemon Orchard comes out July 2, but is available for pre-order now.
Here’s what I can’t wait to read: Caroline’s new novel, Is This Tomorrow, a May Indie Next Pick.
And here’s Caroline in a baseball cap:

One can never be alone enough to write — Susan Sontag

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day — Ernest Hemingway, 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

The computer makes writing both easier and harder. It makes revision easier but it’s a portal to the Internet which is a distraction. The internet has pluses and minuses. When I first discovered it I was distracted by it all the time. Email, constant contact–both wonderful and destructive, like the best addictions. Facebook provides the sense of a social life; Pinterest seems to me to be intuitive and wordless communication, a way to say who you are, or at least who you are at the moment of pinning a picture or poem; Twitter is immediate like speed or sugar; a comic artist introduced me to Tumblr, and I think I like the feeling of it. But let’s face it, the Internet is hell on writing.
My father, who sold and repaired Olympia typewriters, gave me an Olympia SM 9 when I was in school. I’m glad they still make ribbons for it. I’ve stocked up in case they stop.
I think the sound of the keys comforts me; I know the cats like it. They sit close, as if the typewriter is a hearth. Most of the time I still write on my computer and sometimes on those nights I dream I am typing. Either way the stories get told.
Life is writing and writing is life.

Amazon • Apple • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

My essay Midnight Typing is included in the collection What My Mother Gave Me, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, and out now from Algonquin Books.

My mother gave me many gifts, and one of them was the encouragement to write.  She led by example, often writing into the night after she’d put my sisters and me to bed.  Her artistic spirit inspired me, and it’s embodied in a little drawing she did shortly before she died.  The pen-and-ink sketch depicts her scottie Gelsey; just below, in her shaking handwriting, is the phrase Beware of Wee Ferocious Beastie. For several months it hung in the window of her kitchen door, and it was quintessentially my mother in so many ways–if you knew her, you might know what I mean.  Even when she was dying she guarded her solitude, her time for writing and painting and sketching.

I keep the drawing framed in the kitchen of the Connecticut beach cottage she so loved; it makes me think of her and feel her presence and support.

The book contains work by so many writers I love and admire, and I feel immensely honored that Liz included me.  Here are the other contributors: Roxana Robinson, Caroline Leavitt, Maud Newton, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Katha Pollitt, Ann Hood, Margo Jefferson, Emma Straub, Mary Gordon, Judith Hillman Paterson, Cheryl Pearl Sucher, Abigail Pogrebin, Reverend Liilian Daniel, Celia Munoz, Elissa Shapell, Karen Karbo, Charlotte Silver, Rita Dove, Luanne Rice, Elinor Lipman, Martha McPhee, Dahlia Lithwick, Mameve Medwed, Susan Stamberg, Joyce Carol Oates, Sheila Kohler, Marge Piercy, Eleanor Clift, Mary Morris, Lisa See, Elizabeth Benedict

Buy the Book

Amazon • Apple • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

Drawing by Lucille Arrigan Rice:

Here’s a fascinating essay by Vanessa Veselka:   The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters.

I thank my writing pal Joe Monninger for sharing it with me and therefore sending me on a remembrance-of-road-odysseys-past.    I went through a hitchhiking phase in my teens, and I sometimes have nightmares of a couple specific close calls.  One happened somewhere between Old Lyme CT and Hightstown NJ; it was early October, after a summer at the beach, and I missed one of my beach friends so much I decided to hitch down to visit him in boarding school.

In this space I normally write about the nature of summer friendships, the depth of love for my beach friends, but Vanessa’s essay takes me to a different place, to the reality of what happened on the road.  There I was–17, maybe?–standing thumb-out on an I-95 entrance ramp, so convinced of my own invincibility that I climbed into the cab of an 18-wheeler.  I can’t picture the driver, but I can see that truck–red cab littered with fast food wrappers and a dark curtain behind the seats.  ”Check it out back there,” he said.  ”It’s where I sleep.”  That was the first moment my stomach flipped.

I felt brave, resourceful.  That made me reckless, but I only know that now, from the distance of many years.  If I think of my nieces doing what I did, I’d lose it.  Yet even after that ride in the big rig–and the driver’s innuendo and invitation into the back and my opening the door and jumping out at a toll booth–I kept hitchhiking.  I got to Hightstown and later made my way back home.  When my younger sisters were visiting one of their boyfriends in Warren VT, I hitched north through thickly falling snow to meet them.

Right after our father died my sisters started hitching with me–great older sister, wasn’t I?   The the three of us were heading back to Old Lyme from Newport RI and got picked up on Route 138 by some creep in a rattletrap who told us he had beagle puppies at home and would we like to see them?  We scrambled out at the next exit, climbed the ledge that bounded the ramp, and walked for miles along the crest until we got tired and called our mother to pick us up.

Nothing disastrous happened, except perhaps to our psyches.  Stepping so close to the edge, courting danger, has a serious half-life.  You might not be conscious of it, but the what-ifs visit your dreams.  When I was young I was searching for something–I’d push myself to do things that must have scared me at some level–when I think of them now I marvel that I survived, thrived, and wrote about them in short stories and novels.  I feel guilty for taking my sisters on that part of my own strange journey, but back then we were so inseparable it would have been unthinkable to leave them out.

Come to think of it, my new novel, The Lemon Orchard, is about journeys.  Traveling far from what is comfortable to find something you’re not even sure you need…  Maybe that’s just life; it’s certainly been my life.

[Image: The Highwayman by Linden Frederick]